Prelude of Humanity

Chapter 9

Tick... tick... boom! It's February fourteenth.

Valentine's Day.

Too bad it falls on a Monday, everyone's favorite day to be alive.

But anyway, it's a romantic day for everyone. A day where everyone deserves to be at least loved and cared for. By the scenery outside, you could tell various vendors selling out flowers, bouquets, teddy bears, bears, grizzlies—oh, my scale went off the hooks. Jokes aside, it's as simple as giving chocolate or a loved possession to someone that's significant to you.

The day where all the youth's been crazy about.

Hm, I wonder if someone does love and care for me aside from my parents. I mumbled in my mind.

"Akko? Akko... Ak-ko! Oi Akko, down to Earth~! Hello? Buenas tardes?! Akko!"

I was out of my elements, then to my right I was immediately greeted with a small and cute bouquet and a wooden box.

"Awh jeez! Don't doze me off like that!"

Ala-chan imposed a pout, while I just gently held on to the small bouquet and box.

"Forgive me for the elements get the best of me."

"What are you, some romanticist poet back in the day?"

"Hmm..."

We were outside the campus gates early in the afternoon when Ala-chan helped me in looking like a still statue outside. Anyway, we started heading home as we started conversing.

"Speaking of being a romanticist, what does that mean for you Ala?"

"Hmmm... isn't that a term to refer to people who were proponents of the Romantic movement?"

"Yeah that's the term we objectively agree on. It's just sometimes that I thought it's a word that's closely related to romance."

"Y'have a point Akko, I mean the word romanticist has the root romance in it, but at the end of the day, almost everyone would refer to it as a historical term, not the term that might be assumingly related to love."

I just thought that I would call someone a romanticist to better fit today's Valentine's Day. If there's such thing as a womanizer, then I thought about a friendly but still intrusive term would be a romanticist. Maybe that's just me being weird scrambling my vocabulary.

"Let's say Ala you're a person who loves everyone so much or a woman who loves a lot of men, wouldn't it be fitting to call you a romanticist?"

Ala-chan groaned and looked at me stressfully. "Do you think I look like someone who'd speedrun every boy on campus?" she sighed. "If it's anyone's guess, you'd call me like I'm a proponent of the 1800s. Why'd you ask?"

"For instance, it's a unisex yet friendly way to call someone a womanizer."

Chop!

Ouch my head.

"You're still a Crazy Akko."

"No, I meant it in a completely different way—gah... nevermind."

I was about to defend my stance, but I gave up before I even tried when I saw Ala-chan sulking. You know some girls, at their heart of being proficient on heating up arguments, even teensy weensy bit ones, and believe that the one they argued with is wrong or felt offended by them.

Yeah, it's not all sunshine and rainbows for the both of us; Ala-chan has also things that feel too uneasy to talk about with.

Talk about word play, it's like the pronunciation between the words insane and insanity. It would be common to learn the former then the latter, then naturally carry over pronunciations, only to be corrected by individuals that both words entirely differ in pronunciation even though it has the same root meaning. I kid you not, English is really complicated when it comes to defending why such words have this spelling or pronunciation, yet we keep using it as a lingua franca. Does that mean we were left with no choice?